Metallic Love

“Jason and Demeta? You tell me, Loren. Think, and see, and tell me.”

It was as if, once I’d been told what I was, what I could be, I had begun at once to be able to activate it. That little, already familiar, soundless click in my brain.

And mentally I saw, in sharp focus, Jason, lying half-unclothed in a big, glamorous, messy bed. He’d been with Sheena. She’d intoxicated and drugged him, not even had to do any of the grisly sexual acts he liked. He was out and snoring. He wouldn’t wake up for at least two more days. Demeta? Ah, not so kindly. She was locked in a well-furnished room. She was pacing about, frowning. She had no makeup on, no shoes. Her fingernails were still immaculate, and she was still as hard as them. I watched her a moment, there in my head, while her own too- clever mind scratched about to assess what she could do. But she wouldn’t get free until all this was over. And she knew which, perhaps, was the worst punishment of all.

“What will happen when the shuttle launches?” I asked.

“What was said and what you know. Anyone outside, or down here and this side of the river, will be safe enough.”

Jason and Demeta were this side of the river. There were a handful of others, too, asleep or just elegantly imprisoned. They must have offended, or failed some test. I couldn’t care anymore, or make demands.

The birds and the bats aren’t real.

We walked. One by one, the music speakers faded and the lights dimmed out.

We went to the park and looked at the champagne waterfall in the dark. Then into the apartment block, upstairs, to make love on the multicolor carpet, just as they did. Those other two. Jane, Silver.

I dreamed of going to meet my mother, to see if I could persuade her to help me publish my book. Jane:

She guesses I want to use her.

In the dream I wondered if the lift at Chez Stratos would say, “Hallo, Loren.”

But it didn’t speak to me, and rather than emerge in the great big sky-room of Demeta’s house in the clouds, with its balloon-bubbles showing amontillado sunset, I was in a frosty narrow chamber, and my mother sat on a sort of slab.

Her hair was red like mahogany. Her eyes were foxy in color. She wore a long white robe, like an actress acting a priestess in some Middle Ages video.

“Better be careful,” said my mother to me. “After this visit they’ll be able to keep an eye on you. It’s the bio-mechanics you have. Better than a chip. On the other hand, Loren, it’s just those same bio-mechs that can help you to block their scanners, or any of their systems. That’s what you were doing since you were eleven. But when you fall down the stairs in a minute or so, they’ll look after you, and rev up their own machines so from now on they can trace your movements. Only when you learn, will that be stopped—by you. About eighteen, that’s when it’ll happen. And then they won’t be able to know a thing about you anymore that you don’t want them to know.”

“Like Silver,” I said. “The way he does it.”

“Verlis, Loren,” said my mother fastidiously, almost Demeta for one split second.

When I awaken, my lover has gone, and on the pillow there’s a silver ring with a stone like blue-green turquoise. It will last twenty-four hours, or so I guess. That’s what he promised me before.

Is my dream correct? My mother, on the slab in the mortuary—but alive—saying I can now fool the authorities just as Verlis and the rest of them can.

Or was it my own brain again, processing the information?

I recall how I used to pretend to be invisible to the Apocalytes, after I’d gotten away from them. Had that activated the block that blinded everyone else—the fear-fantasy of a twelve-year-old kid? I think, too, how starting to write my book, I carefully renamed “Danny,” to protect him, and his illegal cleaning gangs. But from the time I was fifteen, META could have tipped off the Senate. Did I somehow… blind them to that, too?

The launch is in about an hour. Before first light. Verlis will be back. He’s just been finalizing the last of any mechanized stuff here. We’ll be together, and we’ll hear the roar two miles off, terrible, like dragons bellowing in the mountain.

I put the ring on my finger, and then wrote all this. The ring feels solid. The stone’s so blue.

We may die—or is it “die” (his kind of death— mine—what can mine be?). Not now, but soon, out on the mountain, say. Or later, somewhere. I wrote, didn’t I, how I didn’t think I’d be alive much longer? Because part of me is so sure I won’t. How can I? How can this be feasible?

And I said I’ve hated him.

I hated him. But the way I hated Verlis, it’s pronounced Elovy-ee. What else can you feel for gods anyway, but both? And some love—burns. It hurts, even when you have it. It rips the scales off your eyes and makes you see too much. It never lets go.

I saw him say good-bye, and embrace B.C. and Glaya. They—all three—became one thing. Like a carved pillar of silver and jet. Then they separated. Were three individual beings again. Alone. That, too, is love. Love that burns. He and I—what will become of us? If we live.

CHAPTER 6

First I saw you,

(Love is leaves)

Next I loved you,

(Green that deceives)

Leaves, when they fall,

Bring winter in;

Summer’s the stranger

I meet in your skin.

• 1 •

We watched, out on the mountainside.

There was a drone, and then a thunder, until the rock vibrated. The sky was still dark, and then the dawn came in one scarlet gust, and soared upwards into the stratosphere on a ribbon of white.

All around, as the thunder ended, birds in cold pine trees began to call, until their too-early music faltered. But the east was starting to turn gray. They wouldn’t have to wait long to begin again.

“Was it so simple?” I spoke aloud.

Yes, he answered. But I heard him in my head. Not entirely a voice, yet Verlis, unmistakably. And I thought, perhaps, this had always been—this telepathy—a feature of our dialogues, even if I’d never noticed.

Where we were, the pines grew thick. But even as the bird noises petered out, the chug of robo-copters was punching the air, and getting nearer and nearer, and above us the boughs crackled. Thin headlights sprayed through the trees. The whole battalion of fropters was apparently now aware that something had been perpetrated behind the mountains, and they were rising up, angry as wasps.

I waited beside him. He’d told me, deep in the pines as we were, we wouldn’t be seen, and I’d believed him.