Metallic Love

days.” (Remolecularizing without scientific aid still isn’t that simple for me.)

But Verlis said, “He’s a nice child, Loren. Look, he has a walking-cat with him.”

I turned to see, and in that moment another signal came from Verlis’s brain, under the hat and the gray hair. It wasn’t a warning, but nevertheless, it was cold, steely, sudden, and all centered on the redheaded child. The brain-picture I’d already been getting as I turned was altered in my mind. It swam, pulsated, growing very tall, fiery—

Alarmed, I spun round.

I saw the cat first, which was a big specimen, a male about the size of a bulldog, but walking neatly on a leash. Those cats were called Siamese once. His legs, tail, and face were as chocolate as any chocolattina, the main coat very thick, a luminous mid-blond, with a silvery halo (silver) along the finer outer hairs. From the chocolate mask stared two eyes, oval and crossed, colored like those topazes which are pale blue. The leash looked like purple velvet. And the little boy, too, he was very well dressed. He was about five years of age. He had fair skin tanned light brown, and brown eyes, and hair that was chestnut-red.

My thoughts were scrambled. This numbed, harsh beat of something unreadable from Verlis, my own idea no kid should be on display so well dressed in such a place—my God, he even had a wristlet of silver.

He smiled at me, then. A confident but not pushy or attention-seeking smile. He came right over to us, the cat stalking before him the length of the lead.

The cat spoke first. It had the weirdest voice, like a doll with a cranky mechanism.

The little boy said, “Buona sera, signorina, signore.”

I can speak several languages now. What I am inside helps with that. Back then, I had Italian enough, and Verlis, of course, had everything. But before either of us could respond, the child switched abruptly, fluently, to a fluid, accented English.

“It’s a hot day. May I fetch you something?”

I started to say, “Thank you, no, that’s all right—”

Verlis spoke over me in his cracked, unRejuvinexed seventy-year-old voice.

“Who are you?”

“I, signore? My name is Julio, with a J, as in the Spanish. And this is my cat, Imperiale.”

Verlis—even as he was—looked white and strained. I touched his hand. He gripped my hand in his and said, “I don’t mean that.”

“No, signore?” The child looked right at me. He had a glorious smile. His face was attractive; one day he’d be sensational. He had the eyes of a tiger.

I knew. Thought I knew. Knew Verlis knew, as I did.

The cat meowed again in his strong startling way. And then a burly bodyguard was there, standing behind the child, looking us over.

“Julio,” said the bodyguard in Italian, “your mother says you shouldn’t bother these people.”

The child glanced up at the bodyguard, and you saw the guy loved the child, was a slave to him, would die for him. The child said, now also in Italian, “Do you remember, Gino, about my dream?”

Gino chuckled. “But this is an old, elderly gentleman. He won’t be interested.” He nodded to Verlis and to me. “Julio dreams of robots, signore. He tells his mother he was a robot once.”

I sat like a stone.

Verlis said softly, “He has wonderful English.”

“Yes, it’s curious, signore. He picked that up in his second year. Like he almost was born with it. His mother has no idea how he learned it. Apart from tourists, maybe, except he sees so few. I think this is why he came to talk with you, signore. Though your Italian, may I say, is perfect. Oh, but you should hear this boy play piano. Never taught—just has the gift. Already he is a virtuoso.”

The child said, gazing at Verlis, “Do you like silver things, signore? Would you like this?” And he sprung the wristlet from his wrist, and held it out before Verlis.

The bodyguard exclaimed, “No, Julio!” He was shocked.

But none of us—the child, Verlis, and I—took any notice. And anyway, adoringly used to the boy’s eccentricities, no doubt, the bodyguard didn’t protest again.

Verlis reached out and took the wristlet.

“Why?” he said.

“You and I. We can share the same thing,” said the child.

My heart snagged.

Through its ragged uproar, I heard Verlis say, “Then—”

But the child named Julio had darted round. He and the cat raced off over the broken tiling of the airport lounge. Still amused, the bodyguard ran after, “So long, signore, signorina—Julio! Julio!”

Verlis and I sat on the bench. We said nothing. His mind was shut off, like a bellowing room behind a door.

Sometimes Verlis communicates with the team, the gods, on the dark side of the moon.

He reveals nothing of this, apart from saying everything’s okay, no threat or horror is imminent, for them, or for us. Would I know, even now, if he lied? Would my own abilities inform me?

He’s making (he says “making” not composing) an opera. They can see another spectrum of color, his kind, as well as the spectrum humans have. I, despite what I am and all the “practice” I put in, won’t ever see those other colors Verlis sees. Even if his mind tries to show my mind, even my inner eye can’t see them. He says that music is humanity’s highest expressive form. Including the human voice, or what will pass as a (superlative) human voice, raises music further, to some transcendant apex. But language, unless everyone can speak the same one, then becomes the obstacle. And so every aria or episode of his opera is to be only a color of the human spectrum. A color made in music, and in light, and in the words the singer will sing. We can always get cash, so providing him with instruments would never be difficult. But now he uses only his brain as the instrument. Sometimes he’ll play me the symphonic strains that are flowing in his head, and I hear them in my own, and the voices singing—Glaya’s voice, her two voices, that’s what I hear then, and his. It isn’t emotionless, this color opera, it’s pure emotion—passion, pain, longing, joy…

Last night, as we were curled together in that special kind of “sleep” he always had, and that now I have, too, when he and I wander together in the forms we originally wore—a tawny girl, a silver man with long and fire- red hair—last night, in that double dream-which-isn’t, Verlis said to me, “Do you remember?” And he put the silver wristlet the child passed to him into my hand. All the silver rings and other jewels he gives me from himself always vanish in a few hours. But the wristlet is real, out in the world. He wears it there inside his shirt, hanging on a cord. “Yesterday,” Verlis said. “Tomorrow. But there’s no Now. You keep us safe, Loren,” Verlis said.

And so I’ve added this last section to my Book. If the boy was Silver, reincarnated as a human, who knows? Or if any of us, metal or mortal, has a soul… Verlis and Loren—he and I—that’s all I care about. All I want. He and I.

He and I.

About the Author

Tanith Lee was born in 1947 in London, England. She received her secondary education at Prendergast Grammar School, Catford. She began to write at the age of nine.

After school she worked variously as a library assistant, a shop assistant, a filing clerk, and a waitress. At age twenty-five she spent one year at art college.

From 1970 to 1971 three of Lee’s children’s books were published. In 1975 DAW Books USA published Lee’s The Birthgrave, and thereafter twenty-six of her books, enabling her to become a full-time writer.