Metallic Love

The downdraft as the heavy planes thumped across the forest showered us with pine needles, in the strafe of searchlights. Then they had gone over. Huge hideous insects, equipped with air-to-ground stings, they swarmed above the upper peaks, seeking with robotic eyes.

What they wanted was safely away.

“We should go now,” he said to me. Voice or synaptic link—it was becoming all the same, for the time being.

One hour before this, he had shown me the ultimate ability he and his kind now possesses, and demonstrated it, there in the apartment below. And when I’d cried out in terror, he returned to me instantly.

Only gods, hated and loved, have these powers, even if they acquire them through the scientific acuity of such crawling things as a Jason and a Demeta.

Now, out on the winter mountain, he said to me again, “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

I heard him smile in my mind. “Don’t tell me you finally trust me.”

“Never.”

It’s like glass shattering at an unseen blow.

He stands there in front of me in his somber clothing, his long hair red in darkness, his skin that’s the metal of that moon, where all the rest have flown. And then—the glass breaks. He’s all fragments, splinters—crimson, silver—splashing through the shadow-smoke. (Taken and cut out in little stars—) Then gone.

To shape-change was only the start of the process. Now they have this. Their atoms fragment and whirl apart—and they vanish. No other creature on this earth has a power like that. Only the magicians in old stories, or twelve-year-olds who pretend to become invisible in order to hide.

God knows what filthy military or subversive use such a technique was planned to assist. But like fire, once, for now this gift has been denied to men.

Invisible, Verlis hangs over and all around me. I’m veiled and clothed, covered under a dome of energy that is the spinning molecules of my unhuman lover. And so the cloak of protective invisibility is also mine now, just as the rocket-shuttle, out in space, will have become cloaked by the revolving cordoning unseeable sequins of Glay and She, Co and Gee, B.C., Kitty and Ice. Held in that sorcery, it, too, will travel unseen.

Why should you accept any of what I’m telling you? It’s insane. It’s true.

How else, under the maelstrom of thumping fropters, between the motorized patrols, their bucketing vehicles and shouting men with guns, did he and I get down the mountain?

The energy of him, when disintegrated, stays palpable. I could feel it on my skin, the faintest warm pressure tingling in the freezing predawn air. It kept me from the cold. It kept me from stumbling, and from all danger. And I walked. And everywhere the searchers bounded, passing me bawling and running, so close I smelled cigarines or mouthwash on their breath. So close, once, before I could dodge him, one man nudged me with his racing body. But he never even faltered. I wasn’t, for him, there. And farther down, where the quiet had come back, the unsettled deer looked up, in a slender glade by a frozen stream, where icicles webbed the trees. The deer looked up and never saw us. We wove slowly through them, past does with silvery-lit eyes, and if they, too, felt some brush of something, it didn’t concern them. Maybe we were only like a lighter, warmer snow.

Concealed in my protective envelope that was Verlis’s unraveled body, I descended the holy mountain to the roads of mankind beneath. I was drunk with the strangest happiness I ever experienced in all my life. And like that single act of sexual love, the——, this, too, has never come to me again.

I recollect I spoke poetry to him in my head. Of course he heard me. I heard the color of his laugh. It’s all so extreme. Who was that poet that said the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom?

You won’t believe any of this. I wouldn’t. I don’t think I would…. Yet even though I was slung among the wicked when a baby, they brought me up to believe in miracles.

• 2 •

You wouldn’t know us now. I don’t know myself. I look in any mirror and think, Who are you? Oddly, I don’t really think that about him. He’s handsome, still a man you’d maybe turn to look at, one you might afterwards remember awhile. If he was your type. But—you couldn’t know he was Verlis. No, none of you, even his enemies and mine, especially they. But I always know him. Even if he isn’t to be seen. Even then.

Where we are now, well, I’m not going to write it down. So don’t anticipate some invented name. It’s a long way off from the cities where we started. Or, maybe, it’s right next door. We do as we please. We’re free as birds.

There’s been nothing ever broadcast about the others. The moon remains a mysterious lantern in the night, that men walked on once and don’t go near now. It has no stations, of course. The Asteroid sails across the afternoon or the dusk, reminding us all that one day the roof of the sky may come down—but so far it hasn’t. And robots? Ah, heck, no matter how brilliant they’re cracked up to be, something always goes wrong with them.

We could tell the world the facts. We don’t. And this book of mine: Loren’s Story—I may publish (it’s easy; my lover, after all, is a master of computer manipulation). But will I? Won’t I? Perhaps I’ll only pack it into some sealing waterproof and stuff it somewhere, as it is, handwritten and illegible. On a train, on a plane. Under a floor. Under an ocean.

Why, then, did I write the last pages, and now these?

Oh, yeah. All those years of clearing up other people’s places. That’s what it is. Loren, the Dust Babe, compulsively tidying her world.

So I finished the story. And that was where the story ends, back there when we leave the mountains and go off on our own unclassified journey, not afraid of ID scanners or any other machine, able to fix everything, even able to draw I.M.U. funds and, as if by a spell, leave no mark. Aside from that, I must tell you nothing at all. I won’t risk it. Except—

There was an airport. That day, almost a year ago now. An old architectural airport, decaying, with planes strongly rumored unsafe, and outside lay this wonderful daytime ghost of an Italian city. (It’s okay for you to know that. It’s a million miles from here… or just down the street.) And while we lingered in the boiling lounge, between two unsafe planes, something happened. Something.

Jane adds her own epilogue to her story. Now I give you mine.

That afternoon I had red, nondyed, shape-changed hair. I was all a little shape- changed, too—heavier, Venus Media. My companion was an old man, stylish in an old-fashioned suit, and carrying an attache case. I called him Father. He called me Lucy. We looked prosperous enough to be worth a plane ticket, and not so much that any of the roaming thieves had any acute eye for us. We didn’t want to hurt anyone, my father and I. I had already learned a lot about my own physical capabilities, both immediate and kinetic. (Practice makes perfect.)

Anyhow, sitting there, we looked out at the ruined city in the honey-gold of westering sun. Some of the ruins were Ancient Roman, and some were due to the Asteroid; a number of short quakes had rocked the area only last week, which is one reason the plane was so late.

“Father,” I said, “would you like a drink? A chocolattina?” (Both our hungers are largely psychosomatic.)

Fretful, elderly Dad peers at me over his spectacles. “Too hot, Lucy. Too hot.”

“Well, you could have one iced.”

He tsks. I seem mildly irritated.

We act these scenes. They help our credentials. But really we are playing.

Inside we were both laughing at it, like silly adolescents fooling the grown-ups, and that was when he said to me, not aloud, but in my mind, “Look, Loren. That child has the same hair you do.”

“Oh, but I doubt he’s gotten it with all the effort I did, staring at it in a mirror off and on for about two